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You don't need nitrous oxide. All you need to do is displace oxygen with an inert gas like nitrogen. A scuba rebreather can malfunction in this way, and it leads to painless and unexpected unconsciousness. (That's why they have multiple oxygen sensors, and why you replace them on schedule if you're smart.)

You would not want CO2 in the execution process, as the feeling of asphyxiation is caused by inability to dump CO2, not a lack of O2. If you can keep exhaling the CO2 that you produce into a large volume of an inert gas, you'll pass out without discomfort.

All you need for effective and humane executions is nitrogen. There is no medical mystery about how to do the job. There is no need for drug cocktails and contraptions. There *is* a need for some new legislation, or court rulings. If we're going to keep executing people, we can at least stop torturing them to death.

According to wikipedia, Oklahoma has made inert gas asphyxiation legal, but the ABC news citation link is busted and I can't find a primary source.

What if there was no rush hour, or a greatly lessened one? Rush hour is in large part an artifact of our requirement to get to an office at a certain time. If we changed the way we worked and eliminated that requirement wherever possible, peak demand would drop and that would help with a lot of transportation problems.

A lot of information workers don't need to be at the office. It's tradition that keeps them there. We can build new traditions that keep them working at home, or close to home. We already have the tools to make it possible.

It isn't a panacea. A lot of people need to be present at their workplace. There are still events that will drive peak demand. But it would have to help.

I see us waste literally millions of dollars a year--just flushed right down the drain--but raises are rare as hen's teeth. Promotions, too. They apologetically explain that there are policies which must be followed.

They can't promote you from a Level X to Level X+1 until you have enough direct reports. It's policy! Oh, your group is small enough that you will never have any direct reports? Unfortunately, you can therefore never be promoted. So sorry... but it's policy.

I assume it is made this way to reap the same benefits of "zero tolerance" policies in schools. When there is a policy, no matter how toxic, you just follow it, and you are protected.

Meanwhile the rules are different for new hires. We must attract top talent! Big titles for everyone new! There are policies in place for this too, and a budgetary structure which explicitly supports this divisive system.

> ACA helps because when you switch jobs, you know that you can get reasonably priced insurance afterwards.

Depends on your definition of reasonable. My wife an I are in our early 40s. Catastrophic coverage which will help if we get hit by a bus, but offers nothing short of that due to a giant deductible, is about $500/mo. Health care which isn't quite as good as the typical white-collar job benefit I currently have would cost about $800/mo.That's more than it costs to lease a base model Tesla.

Those values do not feel especially reasonable, and they do keep me less mobile as a worker. Maybe things are cheaper in other states.

I've always been under the impression that should "strong AI" in the sci-fi sense become a reality, the machines would be complex enough that we would not understand every last bit-flip in their operation, at least not up front. The machine would be loaded with concealed information--weights in neural networks that themselves were the output of other algorithms, that kind of thing. We could figure out any aspect of it on demand... but we wouldn't know it all if we didn't go looking.

In a biology analogy: we might learn to grow a brain, and teach it things, and talk to it, but we wouldn't understand the total function of every single chemical signal that crossed every cellular membrane until we started cutting it up.

This is the opposite of a CPU, where an engineer planned every single P-N junction on the wafer. Sure, some of it may have been placed by computerized tools, but it is all understood in advance, down to the movement of electrons.

Is my impression that "strong AI" will be an inherently obfuscated system valid? Or is it just more of the same kind of software complexity that we already deal with?